Music of the Wild 



I never saw "father" and "motlier." They 



were gone before the willoAvs called me. Her son 



"Father" told me that "mother had big brown eyes and 



""'^ , M'hite hair, and her clieeks ^\ere ahvavs a little 



Mother • , ,, /^f. -i i " ■ 



pink. Of conrse they were. Like the cinnamon 

 j^inks of her garden. So by the lilies and the rag- 

 ged robins and lier j^orch, facing from the dust 

 and turmoil of travel, we know "mother." And 

 by the schoolhouse he built with his hands, by the 

 cultivation of beauty and music all around his 

 home and entire farm, by the neatness of his barns 

 and outbuildings, by the trees he spared and the 

 trees he planted, we know "father." By these 

 things we know where "father" is to-day. So when 

 the last book is A\'ritten and the last picture made, 

 if I have done my work nearly so well as "father" 

 did his, perhaps we Mill have a hai)]n' meeting. 



I should love to tell him that his M'ork lives as 

 an example to his neighl)ors: how his willows have 

 grown, and that they called me from afar, and I 

 put them into a book for thousands to see, that 

 they might learn of his great-hearted liumanity. 

 I shall want to tell him how many hours I have 

 lain on the grass under the liig ])ear tree at the 

 corner of his house, of all the lunches I have eaten 

 on the front porch looking into the orchard, of 

 the cotton-tails that yet scampered there unafraid, 

 and how one season a little red-eyed vireo l)uilt 

 on a branch of the a]5ple tree swaying across 



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